Week that was

Drank: Chamomile Tea

Saw: Two people helping an elderly woman walk against the wind
Disliked: My lingering cold

Read: "The Orphan Master’s Son" by Adam Johnson 

Watched: Doubt with Meryl Streep & Philip Seymour Hoffman

Composed this note for the ladies’ room: 'Who keeps wadding kitchen paper towels together and stuffing them into the bathroom stall toilet paper roll with the toilet paper? Is it some harebrained attempt to 'save' paper, in this case paper that someone took too much of, and then forced on anyone who had to use the bathroom?'

Laughed at: This epic battle

Ate: Ciobar, Italian hot chocolate that’s more like hot pudding in a cup

Listened to: Robert Coover read Italo Calvino’s story “The Daughters of the Moon”

Bought: "Katz und Maus" by Günter Grass, which my son needs for German class 

Learned: Americans are split on whether to pronounce 'mayonnaise' as "man-aze" or "may-uh-naze"

Enjoyed: Hot bath with camphor and eucalyptus

Pithiness of the week: “If you run after two hares you will catch neither.” - Erasmus

202

Happy Charles Dickens’ birthday.

I was lucky to add The Pickwick Papers to the asset side of my reading equation last month, a buoyant, rich and very funny book. As Dickens’ first book, you see the seed of some of his later work here: the interminable law suits (Bleak House), the beloved relative in the debtors’ prison (Little Dorrit), the finger-wagging spirits (A Christmas Carol), and more. 

This book was the favorite of both Fernando Pessoa and Giuseppe Lampedusa, and such high-brow admiration made me a bit afraid of what it would be like. I’d also heard there wasn’t much of a story line, so I worried. Would there be a plot? Would there be characters to follow? Wouldn’t it suck if I didn’t like it? 

I worried for naught, for though the narrative is somewhat liquid, running off on various tangents, there is a plot to frame it, and the characters are marvelous, especially --as anyone who’s read it knows -- Sam Weller, Mr. Pickwick’s servant. Mr. Pickwick himself radiates benevolence, and as always with Dickens, the outright melodrama of it all is like a little kindling in your hands. 

Dickens is a great observer, and his scenes and dialogues can be hilarious. Take, for example, Sam Weller’s father’s explanation of the character of pike keepers:

"Wery queer life is a pike-keeper's, sir."

"A what?" said Mr. Pickwick.

"A pike-keeper."

"What do you mean by pike-keeper?" inquired Mr. Peter Magnus.

"The old 'un means a turnpike keeper, gen'l'm'n," observed Mr. Samuel Weller, in explanation.

"Oh," said Mr. Pickwick, "I see. Yes; very curious life. Very uncomfortable."

"They're all on 'em men as has met vith some disappointment in life," said Mr. Weller senior.

"Ay, ay?" said Mr. Pickwick.

"Yes. Consequence of vich, they retires from the world, and shuts themselves up in pikes; partly with the view of being solitary, and partly to rewenge themselves on mankind, by takin' tolls."

"Dear me," said Mr. Pickwick, "I never knew that before."

Hey, me neither! But now I do. 

Like Pessoa, I can now say that a great tragedy of my life is having read The Pickwick Papers, since I can never read it for the first time again.

I'd also rather walk 10 mins to the next stop than sit waiting 15 mins for the next bus

I’m glad to be from a planet that didn’t know heroin was snortable.

I stayed home again. I spent days under the lurch of sore limbs, head like a bucket of rocks and oil. Although better this morning, it was only in comparison. I thought of the expression “feeling human again” and reminded myself to question all set phrases because what are physical pain and suffering if not human? 

Not to leave out the other animals. 

After reading news the other day about the unfortunate who was strangled to death when her scarf, and then her hair, got caught in escalator steps, I dreamed I was a rescuer who carried scissors in her purse.

Escalators are one of my peeves, or rather escalator riders. Escalators were not invented to make you lazier, but to make you faster. You hasten your journey by walking up them instead of taking them as an invitation to stand still. You get a pass if your leg is broken or you are over 60. 

OK, 57.

The weight of heavy buttocks

In "In the Voice of a Minor Saint," my longest-ago chapbook, I had a poem called God Have Pity on the Smell of Gasoline. I was flipping through Yehuda Amichai's Selected Poetry today and remembered where the inspiration came from.

There are a lot of excellent poems in his book, and good titles, too. Like You Carry the Weight of Heavy Buttocks. And My Father in a White Space Suit. And Ballad of the Washed Hair. Never underestimate the power of a good title. It will win you friends.

Goodbye January

It wasn’t a great month. Nothing but poetry rejections. I fell on an escalator and gashed my shins. I ate too much, including apples. And at the end I got a cold with a sore throat and a painful cough, each one like a bullet being shot both from me and at me. So much for the apple-a-day theory. 

I called in sick yesterday and lay completely wiped out in bed. A headache made it impossible to read, so I listened to two New Yorker fiction podcasts and picked the duds. Later I was able to read a little of the book I recently began, “The Orphan Master’s Son,” and even 100 pages into it I’m not sure what this book is trying to do. The effusive blurbs make me think I’ve missed the boat. Oh, and it won the Pulitzer Prize. 

So being sick sucks, and let us hope February is a step up from January, which is always too damned long anyway. 

Oh, here’s a good thing: Kathleen Kirk sent me her chapbook Interior Sculpture, a collection of poems about the sculptor Camille Claudel. Kathleen is a terrific poet and the poems work wonderfully. Thank you, Kathleen, for the bright spot.

the week past

Ate: Mushrooms with walnuts and gruyere

Bought: Tickets for Momix Botanica

Received: Joanna Newsom’s Ys from a colleague

Saw: A photo of an angry man that was also funny

Disliked: Poetry rejections

Read: “Girls, Look Out for Todd Bernstein” 

Watched: Raiders of the Lost Ark 

Rolled my eyes at: The short life of Frankfurt snow

Ordered: The Waste Books for my father

Cried over: The melodrama of The Pickwick Papers

Listened to: Le Nozze di Figaro

Drank: Nebbiolo 

Pithiness of the week: “Nothing can contribute more to a soul's peace than the lack of any opinion whatsoever.” - Georg Christoph Lichtenberg

Let Us Now Praise Small Apples

As the world knows I’m eating an apple a day in January. I have sought out odd sorts and gone to organic groceries and put aside my prejudice for unbruised beauty.

Alas, despite passing fancies, I have not been swayed into the fan club. The big whoop today was finding some tasty, tight apples that were petite, and it struck me that supermarkets generally carry apples the size of bocce balls. That might impress you, but taste and texture-wise is not always Eden. Anyway, I’m going to make it to month’s end, helped by downsizing. 

Meanwhile, I have been asked the describe varieties, and since I worry about falling short, I include musical equivalents. 

Topaz - Since I was looking to sample apples I hadn’t yet tried, I bought a couple of these. Also, they were small and small apples have less room to fail. This was a wonderful apple. Compact and the opposite of mealy, they kept my attention through the whole feast. High-spirited, crisp and not over-sweet. If it were a song it would be by these boys. 

Pinova - Wasn’t this one of Columbus’s ships? The Pinova was smooth and tasty, mellower than the Topaz. If I had to compare the mood and experience of this apple to a song it would be this lovely standard, though the song outshines the apple. 

Elstar - I would have stayed away from Elstar because it is ubiquitous, and because the name reminds me of the failed Ford Edsel. But I was in a bad spot and needed an apple to fulfill my resolution. First go-round I did the flick-the-flesh test and got home with a good one. Second time, too. So I changed my mind about Elstar, whose song should this pop tune. 

Jonagold - Cosmetically this was perfect. It being my first Jonagold in a while I decided to cut it rather than bite into it. The signs were good - it was wet and seemed dense; the knife met resistance and made a crunchy sound slicing through. But, though it wasn’t mealy, the flesh didn’t put up enough resistance. I ate most of it but threw a bit away, lest I choke à la Snow White. It’s like a chanson that sounds and looks good but lacks substance and loses audience interest.

Golden Delicious - A dull, one-dimensional experience, abandoned halfway through. Like this song, who on earth knows why it's so popular. 

Braeburn - Another of the ubiquitous. But from the organic shop, small and obviously not part of some mass industrial harvest, it looked demure and perky, as if it might bounce if I dropped it. It was sweet, crisp and juicy, upbeat as apples should be. Charming, and much appreciated, as this ditty. 

Seven-minute hours

I was stuck on trains again last week. With seven minutes between connections in Fulda, my train from Frankfurt left 20 minutes late, and after they closed the doors for good we were informed that construction work meant we would delayed a full hour. On the way back I missed my train, and had to wait an hour in the dark cold for the next one in Middle-of-Nowhere, Germany, where most of the trains slam past without thought of stopping. Don’t listen to those who complain about the country’s low birthrate. The platform was alive with young people and their junk food and their cursing and their bad fashion decisions.
Very reassuring.

The upside was I chomped through a goodly portion of "The Pickwick Papers," and even listened to two New Yorker fiction podcasts: Richard Ford reading John Cheever’s “Reunion” (12 mins), and Joshua Ferris reading George Saunders’ “Adams” (22 mins), both of which involve fathers. The stories are short and have a great punch, and I recommend listening to them (and the discussions that follow) with all my heart. 

Prodigium

As part of a project I recently looked into positive adjectives often paired with “reader.” 

The most common is “avid,” which clocks in on google with 14.3 million results. “Avid,” of course, means “with eagerness,” suggesting the person reads gladly. It suggests an attitude rather than a quantity or quality.

Next comes “voracious reader,” with 862,000 results. “Voracious” is most often used in the context of food and suggests a big appetite, thus connoting that a person reads in great quantities. 

“Enthusiastic,” a synonym for “avid,” comes in third with 125,000 results. Again it indicates an attitude rather than being necessarily related to taste or quantity. 

Then comes “ravenous reader,” with 37,600 results, an alternative to “voracious.” 

Then comes the slightly oddball “omnivorous reader,” with 37,300 results.

Let me get all schoolmarmy and say an “omnivorous reader” does not necessarily read heaps of books, although that is implied. Rather, s/he reads indiscriminately, devouring everything from pulp fiction to Balkan history to tofu cookbooks to steampunk sci-fi to crime, etc., regardless of genre. In my opinion, one cannot be “an omnivorous reader of social science,” for example, because it already limits the scope.

While “omnivorous” may emphasize curiosity, it demands the reader cease to be discriminating. In the spirit of abandoning books, is that a positive thing? I start to doubt such a reader exists. You’ve got to care little for what you do with your time. 

By the way, last on my list is “prodigious reader,” with 18,700 results. The word “prodigious,” which shares its root with "prodigy," emphasizes accomplishment over appetite, intention or attitude. The first definition in Webster says “wonderful,” and thus this may be the best of all readers.

The pear door was ill

His mother was a French-speaking seamistress - - (seamstress)

Hillary Clinton doubts new haircut, bangs - - (debuts)

Walking the dog in the Aspirin snow - - (Aspen)

Persimmon grows over chances of EU deal - - (pessimism)

Kim Jong Un hails execution of powerful nude - - (uncle)

The pear door was ill - - (poor dear)

Newengland’s suicide exposes women’s plight in India - - (newlywed’s)

Cruise hammered over war mosquitoes - - (misquotes)

Crepe Paper Body

I hate all of love as if it were a single person.
I’ve watched so much smoke drifting off
like the thoughts of someone extremely sick.

I’ve rented a room to be alone with myself,
not wanting to be glutted
about having been hot, at having felt cold.

What would be the outcome of everything
if I tell you that in the branches of my bed
the smoke of volcanoes attires me in its vapors?

I dread the ruin which is due to me,
the woman with the crepe paper body –

high, low, all the time,

here and there impetuous fires.

**
Robert Desnos -One Day When It Was Night Out/ Tristan Tzara -Highway Single Sun/ Antonin Artaud -Moon/ Blaise Cendrars -In the World’s Heart/ Pierre Reverdy -Waterfall/ Paul Eluard -Painted Words/ Tristan Tzara -Song V/ Paul Eluard -Poetry Ought To Have a Practical Purpose/ Robert Desnos -The Voice of Robert Desnos/ Jacques Dupin -Waiting/André Breton -A Branch of Nettles Enters Through the Window/ René Daumal -Sad Little Round of Life/ Paul Eluard -From the Depth of the Abyss

From Ariane to Zabergau

For about 5 minutes on New Year’s Day I had the insane idea to eat an apple a day this year in the spirit of the old adage. The biggest obstacle to such a resolution is that I don’t really like apples. They're not altogether unappetizing, but bad experience has turned me off because it is too easy to get a mealy one. There is little worse than taking a bite of an apple and having it go all grainy in your mouth. Horrible.

But I do like a firm apple, and as a word person I’d love if there were more varieties with romantic and evocative names available. This great article mentions the Blue Pearmain, Pound Sweet, Wolf River and Black Oxford. I would try those just for the bragging rights.

If I could get my hands on them. As in the US, in Germany supermarkets offer the same ubiquitous varieties ad nauseam:  Pink Lady, the two Deliciouses, Granny Smith, Fuji, Braeburn, Jonagold, and Royal Gala. If I could drive I could get out to the nearby orchards and get other kinds, but alas, I am not licensed to access unusual apples.

Still, as of today I’m signing up for an apple-a-day January, and will see how it goes. Today I’m doing an Elstar, originally a cross between the Golden Delicious and Ingrid Marie apples. I am not brave enough to bite right into it, but will be using a sharp knife. 

How much 14 there has been in existence

César Vallejo cuts a sad and driven figure. He was a Peruvian who lived the last quarter of his life in Europe, mostly poor and in bad straits. His poetry was dark and surreal, original and haunted. His most famous poem is probably Black Stone Lying on a White Stone, a fabulous poem.

With 2014 coming over the past few days I’ve been thinking of Vallejo’s poem “Anniversary.” Like so much of his poetry, “Anniversary” mesmerizes. It comes to me often when I encounter the number 14. I don’t know what 14th anniversary he is immortalizing, but for all its mystery, “Anniversary” seems one of his more affirmative poems, to the detriment of 15! 

I give you below the first stanza. Google “César Vallejo anniversary 14” and Google Books will gift you the whole thing. I will tuck Vallejo in my pocket and keep him with me this year.

Anniversary

How much 14 there has been in existence!

What credits with mist on a corner!

What a synthetic diamond the skull is!

The lengthier 

the sweetness, the deeper the surface,

how much 14 there has been in such a small 1!

Where I've been

After I snuck a last one in today, here are the books I read this year. Those I'd recommend strongly are marked with an *. I've linked to a random scattering of reviews, too, just for the hell of it. 

Favorites: 

Fiction: The Sense of an Ending by Julian Barnes was most remarkable.

Non-fiction: The Looming Tower by Lawrence Wright, with honorable mentions to Bonhoeffer and Voices from Chernobyl.

Poetry: Nets by Jen Bervin was favorited for the concept as well as the poetry itself, which was rivaled by Sestets.

Short fiction: Tenth of December by George Saunders, followed closely by No One Belongs Here More Than You.

59. The Mansion of Happiness by Robin Ekiss (Dec 31)
58. Television Without Pity by Tara Ariano (Dec 22)
57. Sometimes There Are Travails by Lisa Ciccarello (Dec 22)
56. The Other History by Scott T. Starbuck (Dec 14)
55. The Blind Assassin by Margaret Atwood (Dec 7)
54. Phèdre by Jean Racine (Nov 29)
*53. No One Belongs Here More Than You by Miranda July (Nov 20)
52. The Tiger’s Wife by Téa Obrecht (Nov 13)
51. Off-Topic: The Story of an Internet Revolt by GR Reader (Nov 11)
50. Portuguese Irregular Verbs by Alexander McCall Smith (Nov 5)
*49. The Woman in White by Wilkie Collins (Nov 3)
*48. Voices from Chernobyl by Sveltlana Alexevich (Oct 28)
47. If Not Winter: Fragments of Sappho (Oct 22)
46. Revolutionary Road by Richard Yates (Oct 21)
45. The Girl With the Dragon Tattoo by Stieg Larsson (Oct 17)
44. Songs for the Missing by Stewart O’Nan (Oct 12)
43. Unbroken by Laura Hillenbrand (Oct 10)
42. The Quality of Mercy by Barry Unsworth (Sep 28)
41. Lichtenberg and the Little Flower Girl by Gert Hofmann (Sep 3)
40. Galileo’s Daughter by Dava Sobel (Aug 28)
*39. The Map and the Territory by Michel Houellebecq (Aug 17)
38. The Old Child by Jenny Erpenbeck
*37. The Looming Tower by Lawrence Wright (July)
36. The Chemistry of Death by Simon Beckett (July)
35. Whispers of the Dead by Simon Beckett (July 14)
*34. Tenth of December by George Saunders (Jul 10)
33. Birdsong by Sebastian Faulks (July)
*32. The Piano Teacher by Elfriede Jelenick
*31. Ophelia Unraveling by Carol Berg (June)
*30. Bonhoeffer: Pastor, Martyr, Prophet, Spy by Eric Metaxas (June 21)
29. Morte D’Urban by JF Powers (May 25)
*28. This is Not a Novel by David Markson (May 4)
27. Under the Skin by Michel Faber (April 29)
26. Lamb by Bonnie Nadzam (April 25)
*25. The Book of Disquiet by Fernando Pessoa (April 21)
24. Flaubert’s Parrot by Julian Barnes (April 20)
*23. Nets by Jen Bervin (April 20)
22. Dog Ear by Erica Baum (April 12)
21. After Visiting Friends by Michael Hainey (April 9)
20. The Lambs of London by Peter Ackroyd (April 9)
19. The Finkler Question by Howard Jacobson (April 5)
*18. The Sense of an Ending by Julian Barnes (March 19)
17. In Watermelon Sugar by Richard Brautigan (Mar 15)
16. The Complete Perfectionist by Juan Ramón Jimenéz (Mar 15)
*15. Old Filth by Jane Gardam (Mar 12)
*14. Group Portrait with Lady by Heinrich Böll (Feb 26)
13. Sex with Buildings by Stephanie Barbe Hammer (Feb 19)
12. Corner Office by J. Hope Stein (Feb 18)
*11. Talking Doll by J. Hope Stein (Feb 15)
10. The Quiet Winter by Carrie Bennett (Feb. 9)
9. The Imperfectionists by Tom Rachman (Feb. 8)
8. The Infinities by John Banville (Feb 7)
7. The Big No by George Grosz (Feb)
6. Almanac of the Sleepless by Karin Gottshall (Feb 7)
*5. Sestets by Charles Wright (Feb 6)
4. Too Loud a Solitude by Bohumil Hrabal (Jan. 26)
*3. Wittgenstein’s Mistress by David Markson (Jan. 21)
2. The Best of Fence, ed. Rebecca Wolff (Jan)
1. Of Lamb by Matthea Harvey (Jan. 18)

Threshing song

The past was a hectic time. It was full of kings and beheadings, word coinage, and tunneling out of prison. Dynasties fell. It is believed the ball came before the wheel, the egg before the deviling. There were wars that went on for years and more years; there was a lot of sex, food left uneaten, bookburnings, and tribal and disco dancing. Rules were made up, then changed (read: broken). People got born by the billions.

The invention of the telephone was followed by a lot of senseless and overlapping jabbering. Statistics established average intelligence. Wires crossed, and obesity rode the airwaves. Many flea markets ended with more junk unsold than sold. Dump trucks lugged some surplus to the ocean, which solved one problem while fathering another. 

The past keeps adding up. Some days when I’m struggling with what on earth to make for dinner, I’m glad when it's behind me.

The Year of Abandoned Books

Years ago, my husband had a bookmark listing “The Rights of the Reader.” Along with the right to skip, to dip in, and to mistake fiction for real life, was the all-important right to give up. No one likes to, but sometimes it is a worse decision to press on.

For me, it was a year of abandoned books. True to my half-hearted promise of giving up on books that --given a fair trial-- look like they won't pay off, I drop-kicked a number of titles in 2013. 

“Songs for the Missing,” a novel of a suburban girl who goes missing, failed to make me care. The word ‘boring’ comes to mind. 

My "Lost Illusions" experience was sad and disappointing. I'd really wanted to read the book this year, but the typo/error/major screw-up on p. 1 left me shell-shocked.

“Fatal Vision,” sorry, was just badly written. Good try, true crime. 

Ditto “No Apology” by Mitt Romney, which came off as a self-celebratory and poorly written campaign speech. 

At Good Reads, I ranted about “Galileo’s Daughter,” which turned me off as a feminist, and drew a comment from a fellow reader about what a shallow and immature person I am. I was sorry to get dragged into that, but hey, after much soul-searching I still agree with everything I said. Smile. 

"Birdsong," a WWI novel that had been on my to-read pile for years, was a disappointment I ditched. The ooey-gooey sex did me in - how Isabelle realized she was "born" to have sex with Stephen, to be "impaled" by him, and to feel his "sticky seed" between her legs. Oh, come ON. 

Richard Brautigan’s “In Watermelon Sugar,” a classic of hippie America, was written in a little boy voice that got my eyes rolling. “I get that it's supposed to be simple and innocent, but it would be helpful if it were also good,” I said in a brief review. 

There was a faint odor of something foul lurking through the pages of “The Tiger’s Wife,” which was only fully revealed after I gave up a good lick through and discovered the schmalzy acknowledgements.

Alas! I abandoned a couple others that are not worth noting. I read a lot of worthwhile books, too, which I’ll highlight as part of my year-end list in the next couple days.

The week in hindsight

Learned: the Italian word for ‘rodent’ is ‘roditore,’ which sounds very grand, and means “he who gnaws"

Saw: Albrecht Dürer exhibition at the Städel 

Disliked: what the smell of Kentucky Fried Chicken at the airport at 7 am did to my headache and stomachache 

Read: obituaries online

Ate: Kartoffelpuffer (potato pancakes)

Bought: chunky candles

Skipped: dessert (tiramisu - who can eat the equivalent of 2 dinners after dinner?)

Drank: Primitivo (Puglia)

Received: 2 rejections (Ninth Letter & Tin House)

Watched: Sherlock Holmes episode “The Illustrious Client” 

Rolled my eyes at: Horn honkers in gridlock. You built it, you suffer it. 

Ordered: The Brontes and Mr. Peanut 

Cried over: People greeting their loved ones at the airport. Yeah, I suck at airports. 

Listened to: pages turning, ambulances, people talking with their mouths full 

Pithiness of the week: "To be totally understanding makes one very indulgent."-Baroness De Stael-Holstein 

Mermaids

Robert Oppenheimer went to New Mexico as a youth to recuperate from tuberculosis. He later said he had two loves, physics and New Mexico. Would there be a way to combine them?

Eugene O'Neill had TB, as did Paul Éluard. Albert Camus suffered TB, an ailment compounded by heavy smoking, but though TB toiled away for years, a car crash killed Camus within seconds.

My cousin Christopher, whose middle name was Camus, was killed in the Catskills by a hit-and-run driver, never apprehended.

Emma Goldman ranted incessantly about how stupid people are. Asked by her long-time companion, Alexander Berkman, how she could reconcile that conviction with her drive for anarchy, she was unable to answer the question. 

Watching the 'gadget' explode in Los Alamos in 1945, Oppenheimer thought of the lines from the Bhagavda Gita, "I am become death, the destroyer of worlds."

Miles away a girl who had been blind from birth saw the light of the explosion.

Centuries ago, the existence of mermaids was widely accepted as true. In winter 1493, Columbus wrote in his journal that three of the creatures had been sighted off the coast. They "rose well out of the sea, but were not so beautiful as they paint them."

**
Thanks for Meghan Howland for the image. 

Lost Faith

I began Lost Illusions yesterday. It opens auspiciously in a print shop, and Balzac describes who was called a ‘monkey’ in the printing industry in those times, and who a ‘bear.’ The distinction had to do with a person's motions, which reminded me of Apollinaire’s poem “At the Santé:” Every morning I pace my pit like a bear.

The narrator talks about the transformation of printing, and how equipment then becoming obsolete had once brought "the beautiful books printed by Elzevir, Plantin, Aldus Didot, and the rest..." Wow, I thought. I like the typeface Didot - I will have to look up Aldus Didot.

I looked up Didot, indeed the name of a family of French typesetters, though none of them named Aldus. Well, I thought, maybe Balzac invented him, this being a work of fiction. But that would be weird since the Didots were real, and Elzevir and Plantin were also breathing people who now have typefaces named after them, and in fact, Aldus, too, is a typeface in and of itself..... ummm….

Helped by Amazon’s “Look Inside” function, I read the first page of Illusions Perdues in French, which said: "...les beaux livres des Elzevier, des Plantin, des Alde et des Didot…"

One needn’t be a French scholar to see the “and” separating Alde/us from Didot. In other words, there should have been a comma between them, or an “and.” Aldus Didot wasn’t meant to be a first and surname. I was so dismayed by this glaring error on the very first page - whether the translator’s or the proofreader’s - that I was unable to read any more of this untrustworthy edition, published by the way by Modern Library Classics!

And that is how I began The Pickwick Papers.

A Week's Hindsight

Learned: the word lalochezia, the use of foul language to relieve stress

Saw: Phèdre (decent acting, horrible play)

Heard: Anita O’Day sing You Came a Long Way from St. Louis

Ate: Coq au Vin

Made a (birthday) wish: can’t say what, but it wasn’t for me

Bought: wrinkle cream (see above)

Read: The Blind Assassin by Margaret Atwood

Skipped: the office Christmas party

Drank: Rioja

Received: the muscular blooms pictured 

Resolved: sit-ups!

Honored: with a Pushcart Prize nomination for my poem ‘Gacela of Ash’

Watched: Lord of the Rings: The Two Towers (umpteenth time)

Rolled my eyes at: person who followed a limping old man into the supermarket shouting at him for parking in a handicap spot without a sticker

Laughed: about these truths

Cried: yup

Pithiness of the week: Our virtues are most frequently but vices in disguise (La Rochefaucauld)

I stole this roundup idea from philoku, a German design blog. Resolve to learn German! 

The movie deal

'Grassland' by Sarah Sloat from Nic Sebastian on Vimeo.

Thanks to Nic Sebastian, wizard queen of many multimedia poetry projects, for this reading and video of my poem Grassland.

Next time I should read the acknowledgements before buying

I recently read and gave up on The Tiger’s Wife. After I decided to go no further, I turned to the acknowledgements, which began:

"I am forever indebted to:
My parents, whose faith is boundless and unfaltering; my baby brother, A., the best illustrator ever; my grandmother, Z., who is a rock.
MK, my traveling companion, diapers to dentures - whose tolerance of late-night phone calls was indispensable to the completion of this book, and whose wit and wisdom have reconnected me to my roots.
AZ, who is a force of nature in everything he touches. We’ve travelled so far, we two.
PS, for giving me the birthday present that set me back on the right path again, and whose love keeps lifting me higher."

That’s about 1/3 of the acknowledgements.

I then read No One Belongs Here More Than You, which I enjoyed. After I finished, I turned to the acknowledgements, which said:

"I’d like to thank each of the following people for their part in helping me make this book: FM, RM, NG, SC and MM."

That was it. 

One terrible thing

In a story I was reading today came the question: What is the most terrifying thing that ever happened to you?

This is hard because you really have to mine your memory. As always I am afraid I will give the wrong answer and that once I give an answer that I won’t be able to change it, as if there were some superpower somewhere keeping track. Of course this is counter-productive and neurotic and prevents the person questioned (me) from even approaching the question, being so preoccupied about the conditions. I had the same problem last month when a friend asked me to name my three favorite Elvis Costello songs were. (WAS NOT ABLE.)

Anyway, I tried to get over that and can tell you one of the first things that comes to my mind, the thing that sifts to the top early on in the memory-mining. 

For Easter I go with my husband and kids (6 and 4?) to London to visit friends. In turn we are invited to friends of theirs for dinner and we set out on the tube to a balmy, upscale suburb. On the way, we arrive at a stop and our friend remembers at the last moment that we should get out. We frantically jump out, grabbing all our stuff, which is voluminous since they have a small child and our children are also not big. We are on the platform with baby buggy, etc. and all, and suddenly she says, “NO! This is the wrong stop!” and exhorts us all to jump back on to the train. 

We do. I am a bit annoyed but to top it off as I am turning around I notice that my daughter is still on the platform and I haven’t a second to do anything but gear up to freak when she realizes herself that she must get in urgently and she takes a long-legged leap through the closing doors, the swoosh of which is burned into my brainplate, and I am so grateful and at the same time (perhaps unjustly) pissed off that I nearly left my daughter behind at an abandoned stop in a foreign city. 

But I didn’t.

Blanche

I saw Blue Jasmine over the weekend, the semi-new Woody Allen movie with Cate Blanchett. It’s the first Woody Allen movie I’ve seen in a long time. Aside from Vicky Cristina Barcelona, which I watched on a plane, I haven’t seen any of his movies since 1994.

The movie owes a lot to A Streetcar Named Desire, but knowing that isn’t crucial. Having read/seen Streetcar might enrich your viewing, but not having seen it shouldn’t bother anyone. 

Anyway, after seeing the movie, which even my husband liked, I googled some reviews to see what critics thought. I saw this roundtable review, in which one of the critics says that Blanchett’s character Jasmine (née Jeanette) has no redeeming qualities.

Wow, I thought. NO redeeming qualities. Was it really true? Did I feel better about my husband’s disliking her now that a reviewer confirmed she was a worthless person? Sort of. Still, I would like to point out that 1) she’s gorgeous, and 2) she has great taste in clothes. Last I heard, those were qualities worth having, as selfish and delusional as one might be. 

Bon appétit

I got this plate from Harald Geisler, a typographer I met a few months ago. He inscribed this old plate with the title of an essay by Hannah Arendt called “Wahrheit und Politik,” or “Truth and Politics.” According to the old adage, the latter makes strange bedfellows, while the former sets you free. So eat up, folks.

Arendt’s essay begins: 

"No one has ever doubted that truth & politics are on rather bad terms with each other, & no one, as far as I know, has ever counted truthfulness among the political virtues. Lies have always been regarded as necessary & justifiable tools not only of the politician’s or the demagogue’s but also of the statesman’s trade. Why is that so? And what does it mean for the nature and the dignity of the political realm, on one side, & for the nature and the dignity of truth & truthfulness, on the other? Is it of the very essence of truth to be impotent & of the very essence of power to be deceitful? And what kind of reality does truth possess if it is powerless in the public realm, which more than any other sphere of human life guarantees reality of existence to natal and mortal men – that is, to beings who know they have appeared out of non-being & will, after a short while, again disappear into it?” You can read the whole essay here. 

Harald decided to make this plate after he got fed up with always finding a logo on glasses, cups and plates - usually an IKEA label. I like how the two roses could themselves be "truth" and "politics," though which is which I don't know. Harald is mostly busy creating typography, but he does have a couple other plates, and every year he puts together a cool calendar using computer keys. If I were to buy something else from him, it would definitely be this arrangement of space bars.

House of cards

After the kids leave, I convert the second bedroom of my mother’s apartment into a bachelor pad. I deflate the air mattress Miles was sleeping on, and set the rickety card table up into a small, soft-lit paradise of books. I hold office there, taking notes on nothing, listening to the crickets. It definitely encourages nightowlness.

I finished Revolutionary Road on my trip, and now feel I never need to drink a martini. I also read The Girl with the Dragon Tattoo, which I found on my sister's shelf. It warned me sufficiently of Swedish mosquitoes.

Unable to find Svetlana Alexievich’s Voices from Chernobyl in either of the big used bookstores I visited, I borrowed it from my mother’s library. It’s a devastating book. You can eat all the radiation you want, but you'll have to bury your shit in your head. 

I picked up poetry books by Sappho, Tao Lin, Michael Ondaatje and Alison Titus. In the poetry aisle of a bookstore I got into a conversation with a bearded gentleman. He asked me who my favorite poets were. My first (unrehearsed, unhesitant) answer was Charles Wright. 

In Future Tense, he wrote:

All things in the end are bittersweet—
An empty gaze, a little way-station just beyond silence.

If you can’t delight in the everyday,
                                                         you have no future here.

And if you can, no future either.

And time, black dog, will sniff you out,
                                                            and lick your lean cheeks,
And lie down beside you—warm, real close—and will not move. 

Red, then orange

[Silence.] [A week later the village was evacuated.] [She starts crying.] [She is silent.] [Silent.] [Silent.] [Long silence.] [She is silent for a long time.] [She is silent.] [She becomes incomprehensible.] [She has trouble breathing.] [She is silent for a long time.] [She stands up, goes over to the window.]

[Starts crying.] [Cheers up suddenly.] [Starts crying.] [Starts crying.]

[Communist youth league.] [Silent.] [Closes his eyes.] [Laughs.] [Laughs.] [Laughs.] [Starts singing.] [Suddenly serious.] [in Moscow] [Starts crying.] [Starts crying.] [Cries.] [Cries.] [Cries.] [Cries.]

[Breaks into tears and completely stops talking.] [Silent. Then cries for a long time.] [Silent again.] [Silent.] [But she adds a bit more.] [She smiles suddenly.] [When we’re saying goodbye, she says some more.] [This effect occurred throughout the region and was presumably caused by toxic radiation.] [Stops.] [Tries not to cry.] [Cries.] [Tries again not to cry.] [Breaks down, Cries.] [The year of Stalin’s Great Terror.] [Silent. Smokes.] [Stops.] [Continues.] [Stops.]

[Laughs.] [Stops short, I can see she doesn’t want to talk.] [Either she’s listening to herself, or arguing with herself.] [After a pause.]

[Silent for a while.] [Laughs suddenly.] [Serious now.] [Silent.] [There’s a long pause in the conversation.] [Stops.] [a space launch center.] [He thinks.] [He is silent.] [Becomes upset.]

[In the days after the accident the pines and evergreens around the reactor turned red, then orange.] [He is in despair, then silent.]

[Valery] [head of the commissioned Chernobyl investigation who actually hanged himself in 1988, on the two-year anniversary of the explosion]

[She is silent.] [Stops.] [as does Bazarov in Turgenev’s Fathers and Sons] [Smiles.] [Cries.] [Takes a break.] [Laughs.] [Laughs.] [Laughs.]

[As he talks he spreads photographs on the table, chair, windowsills: giant sunflowers the size of carriage wheels, a sparrow’s nest in an empty village, a lonely village cemetery with a sign that says, “High radiation. Do not enter.” A baby carriage in the yard of an abandoned house, the windows are boarded up, and in the carriage sits a crow, as if it’s guarding its nest. The ancient sight of cranes over a field that’s gone wild.] [points to the photographs.] [Points again to the photographs.] [Calms down a little.] [Boris] [Gets upset again.] [Silent.] [Goes on for some time but it is impossible to understand what he’s saying.] [Considers this.]

[Thinks.] [Quiet.] [Leonid] [a city in the Southern Urals near the Mayak weapons facility, contaminated and largely evacuated after a nuclear waste tank exploded in 1957] [Silent.] [Extended silence.] [Thinks.] [1986]

[She is silent for a long time.] [Suddenly she smiles.] [She is silent.] [She is silent again.] [Stops.] [Quietly.] [We drink tea and she shows me the family photographs, the wedding photographs. And then, as I’m getting up to go, she stops me.]

-Complete author inserts in monologues from Voices from Chernobyl

“next to of course god america i / love

Since I got here,
the shutdown ended,
NJ governor Christie dropped his appeal against gay marriage,
a school shooting in Nevada left two dead,
German Chancellor Merkel found out the NSA was tapping her phone,
a 13-year old carrying a toy gun was shot dead by police in CA,
a teenager committed suicide by driving head-on into another car on Rt. 27 (NJ), taking two innocents with him,
and I got a Macy’s credit card.

It's the slow city you built in a bottle that makes these blossoms possible

We've been in the states for a week and are enjoying the fall. Today we went to the deserted village in Watchung Reservation and took a short walk among the collapsing houses. There's a very small graveyard with five stones or so, though 24 people are supposedly buried there. This is the only original stone.They'll be having some Halloween events here after we leave, which I'm not unhappy to miss.

I've got three poem-like pieces in the new Menacing Hedge: Miniature City, Cabin and Die Taube. For a real fright, I read them, too.

Tomorrow we're off to New York for four days with some family. My dad and step-mother are taking the kids to a show on Saturday night, giving me a free night. My daughter insists I stay in the apartment. Laugh. If you see me out and about, wave.

Odds

I've been checking the odds over the past few day on who might win the Nobel Prize for Literature. According to betting site Ladbrokes, for days Haruki Murakami had the best odds, followed by Joyce Carol Oates. Far down the list was Svetlana Alexievich, a Belarusian journalist, with 50/1 odds.

But this morning before the winner was announced, I saw she'd shot out ahead of Murakami to top the list. As with Herta Müller, I'd never heard her name, and it wasn't all that easy to find information about her. But what I found (mostly in German) was interesting - she writes about people's lives after the break-up of the Soviet Union, their dashed expectations, about Chernobyl, the Soviet/Afghanistan war, and other eastern European issues.

We all know now that Alice Munro won, and I'm glad. I've read her stories and think she's excellent, but can't help but feel lucky I stumbled on Alekievich, who sounds even more worthwhile. 

Otherwhere, earlier this week I put myself on a diet of 50 pages a day of Unbroken to ensure I'd finish before leaving for the US tomorrow. The world conspired against me, first through my own fault (i.e. forgetting to take it on my commute one day, minus 50), then through the chatty neighbor I met on the train this morning, who chewed my ear off during my reading time. Anyway, you'll be glad to know I finished the book anyway. Very moving story.

And now to pick out something for the 9-hour plane trip. Something (I hope) I won't mind leaving behind. 

If not, overweight fee

I leave for the states Friday, and am embroiled in the pre-transatlantic drama that seems to strike whenever I take such a trip: I’m a good clip through a big book that it will be a trick to finish before I leave. So,

1. Do I stop reading, and resume when I come back? Not a good idea. 

2. Do I take it with me, finish at my mother’s and leave it there? Could do, but she's read it and I promised to lend it to a colleague. 

3. Do I take it, finish it, and lug its heavy ass back in my suitcase, in a pocket better left to a likewise large but unread book? Ugh. Worst-case scenario. 

4. Do I cram the whole book in before Friday morning? Yes, or go blind trying. The book is Laura Hillenbrand’s Unbroken, and it is an exciting read, so at least the book is cooperating. This is my best option, since today I ordered seven books to be sent to my mother’s house, all of which I’ll be lugging back, surely among others. Here they are: 

We Wish to Inform You That Tomorrow We Will Be Killed With Our Families by Philip Gourevitch

Seriously Funny: Poems about Love, Death, Religion, Art, Politics, Sex and Everything Else - Barbara Hamby, David Kirby, eds. 

No One Belongs Here More Than You by Miranda July 

If Not, Winter: Fragments of Sappho - Anne Carson, trans. 

Ordinary Men: Reserve Police Battalion 101 and the Final Solution in Poland by Christopher Browning 

Night of Stone: Death and Memory in 20th Century Russia by Catherine Merridale 

Sum of Every Lost Ship by Allison Titus 

A plaque won’t give you your life back

 

Boy, it’s cold and grey and raining here. One feels the urge to stay inside and drink tea. In this case, fennel-anise-caraway tea. But we went out anyway, and bought a new tea kettle. The rain makes the cobblestones shine and I like the sound car tires make going through puddles. Shhhhhööööjjj.

Walking back through the Nordend neighborhood we found some Stolpersteine, or “stumbling stones.” There are dozens of these around Frankfurt; they mark the addresses where Jews who were deported during the holocaust lived. They’re subtle but also striking, with their minimal information. I keep an album of them on Facebook. 

These are for the Levi family, which lived on Oberweg. Issak, Katinka and their son Karl. They were deported to Majdenek concentration camp in Poland in 1942. According to the stones, the father and mother were murdered there, whereas their 17-year old son is simply described as having died (‘tot’). 

All the stories that must be behind those stones. I think it’s a good thing these are installed around the city. But a plaque won’t give you your life back.

la bella figura

The Italians put photographs of the dead on graves.

The Italians sleep through the warm hours after lunch. 

They tile their floors. 

They are not in a hurry. 

They are not always punctual. 

The Italians do not eat while walking. Eating is done sitting down. 

(Usually while watching TV.) 

The Italians touch you when they are talking, and this is also information.

Midweek

Sunny and cold enough to see your breath this morning. First turtleneck of the year: teal green. Found a moth hole later, not too difficult to conceal. 

Yesterday I forgot my book on my desk when I left work and have now done the work-->home & home-->work commute without it. I know the emptiness of trains, and the anxiety of not knowing what to do with myself. 

“Feel? Let those who read feel,” wrote Fernando Pessoa.

duende

I've been taking a workshop at The Rooster Moans on duende, the dark spirit. In poetry, Federico Garcia Lorca is this spirit's real champion, and though I've been familiar with the concept for some time, I am glad to finally have some space and time to find out what it is. And what it isn't.

I took a stab earlier this year at writing a gacela, a loose non-form Lorca used. The poem, "Gacela of Ash," is up in the new issue of DMQ Review today. My dusty poem "Spark" is there with it.

The zine of short poetry Right Hand Pointing also recently published a poem of mine called "Microbrew," about a small beer. 

Thanks for reading.

Every night my heart comes home kicking my ass

The literary critic I mentioned last week, Marcel Reich-Ranicki, has been buried down the street from me in Frankfurt's main cemetery. It is truly the most beautiful place in town. That now makes four luminaries for me there: Reich-Ranicki, Schopenhauer, Alzheimer, and Adorno.

I would visit anyway. There is one bench I have kept warm for many hours beside an unknown Gustav and Erna. But the bench has since been removed, as have Gustav and Erna's bones and joint gravestone. That's one drawback about the cemetery - unless you are a millionaire or cultural celebrity, you are pretty much renting the space. 

My poem "In Frankfurt Cemetery" also found refugee for only a limited time at Opium, a literary ezine now defunct. I've had it exhumed, and replant it here. It even mentions the sad warning notice they slap on the gravestones when the lease is about to expire. 

In Frankfurt Cemetery 

Trees droop among immovables. 

The rain thinks twice about landing, 

stopped at the leaves. 

Some procure plots with a woodrot cross, 

some a whole hillside, shaky with underground 

chambers, sculpture behind bars. 

Beyond the wall, the traffic brakes and hastens. 

Leave your message after the beep. 

Not the past, but the present makes me sad. 

The eviction notice on the headstone.

Now what? 

Every night my heart comes home kicking my ass. 

What are the oceans up to?

So far apart, do they have the chance to talk?

Chance Readings

"It was a Sunday morning in the beginning of April 1813, a morning which gave promise of one of those bright days when Parisians, for the first time in the year, behold dry pavements underfoot and a cloudless sky overhead.” 

The literary critic Marcel Reich-Ranicki died this week, a looming figure in German contemporary culture. His life story is fascinating. A Jew, he was deported to Poland and just escaped concentration camp, being hidden with his wife in rural Poland by sympathetic people. One thing that really got me about his story was this: 

“When I was arrested in Berlin and deported from Germany in 1938, I was not permitted to take any luggage. All I had in my briefcase was an extra handkerchief and a book. It was a novel I was reading just then - Balzac’s A Woman of Thirty.” 

I love how the detail, so incidental, the book so seemingly random, yet well-remembered as a companion at a fateful moment. In hindsight, he also remarks A Woman of Thirty is "not one of Balzac’s best.” 

The detail of Into the Wild that stands out for me - both at the time I read it and now, years later, when I’ve forgotten most of the story - is that the main figure (whose name escapes me) was reading Dr. Zhivago when he died. I was struck by the romantic coincidence, the stark landscapes of both stories and how they fatefully crossed. 

On Monday my daughter left for a class trip to London. A couple days beforehand she told me which books she would take and asked if I'd pick out a poetry book for her. I didn’t get around to it, and apologizing at the airport I realized I happened to have Federico Garcia Lorca’s Poem of the Deep Song in my purse, which I gave that to her. I can’t imagine I could have picked a better book even with hours of generous deliberation. A class trip isn't as grave an occasion as those above, thank god, but reading Lorca can surely make it more memorable. 

Stargazing in the Library

I was thrilled last week when Passages North accepted The Inner Rodent, an essay I wrote based on my misreadings. I’d never submitted non-fiction before, and the essay was accepted within a day. It’s up on the site as part of their “Writers on Writing” series.

I should be braver. But I am tired. I should write more. But I don’t have a lot of time. 

If you click on the link you’ll see the squirrel is my mascot. Which is cool, because the squirrel is my mascot. 

Fall has descended, and today we had a table at a kids’ flea market, where we sold piles of action figures, jeans, some t-shirts and books. Carlo and I played good cop/bad cop, him being the kindly negotiator and me being the take-it-or-leave-it guy. We made 155 euros, enough to pay for groceries and the kids’ allowance.

From the tip of an island since pulled away

I have a few poems out this week. 

“Stamp Album of the Suicides” is at Dialogist. The inspirations were 1) stamps & stamp albums, which I learned to love in China; 2) respect for suicides, often disparaged for being weak and selfish; and 3) a plain old love of order. Check out the art in this issue - very good. 

A newer ezine, Bitterzoet, has three other poems: “A Hawaii Postcard Arrives in Winter 12 Years Late,” “Breaking News” and “Standing in Line Alone.” They also have a print issue, for which they took two other poems. 

Booze & Meringue

In June I participated in a writer's regimen conducted by the Southeast Review. Basically, it was a program of ideas and quotes and riff words aimed at giving writers a daily prompt. I admit I didn't get to it every day, but if the prompt appealed to me I gave it a shot. One of the prompts was about foreign landscapes, and because I was at the time both reading a book (Elfriede Jelinek's "The Pianist") that mentions cake and receiving emails that included pictures of cake from a typographer acquaintance who was visiting Vienna, I made cake my landscape. 

It was fun to do, and the Southeast Review chose to feature the piece - Booze, Sugar & Meringue - on their site. As a kind of poem-a-day, it's not polished, but cake is also a messy affair, porous, and often full of nuts.

Salesbug

Als Gregor Samsa eines Morgens aus unruhigen Träumen erwachte, fand er sich in seinem Bett zu einem ungeheueren Ungeziefer verwandelt.

“One morning, as Gregor Samsa was waking up from anxious dreams, he discovered that in his bed he had been changed into a monstrous bug.” 

"One morning, as Gregor Samsa was waking up from anxious dreams, he discovered that in bed he had been changed into a monstrous verminous bug."

“As Gregor Samsa awoke one morning from uneasy dreams he found himself transformed in his bed into a gigantic insect.”

"As Gregor Samsa awoke one morning from uneasy dreams, he found himself transformed in his bed into a gigantic insect-like creature." 

"As Gregor Samsa awoke one morning after disturbing dreams, he found himself transformed in his bed into an enormous cockroach." 

"As Gregor Samsa woke one morning from uneasy dreams, he found himself in bed, transformed into a horrible vermin."

"One morning, when Gregor Samsa woke from troubled dreams, he found himself transformed in his bed into a horrible vermin." 

"When Gregor Samsa woke up one morning from unsettling dreams, he found himself changed in his bed into a monstrous vermin."

“As Gregor Samsa awoke from unsettling dreams one morning, he found himself transformed in his bed into a monstrous vermin.” 

Cloudpump

I was back at the Hans Arp museum on the Rhine today. We took a ferry across from Bad Honnef to Remagen, where they built the museum in 2007, joining the new modern building to a renovated train station. I’ve been before and had the same feeling, i.e. that this was the most beautiful museum I’ve ever been in.

This time I had to ask myself more directly: ‘Hey, is this the most beautiful museum I’ve ever been in?’ The answer was a Molly Bloom-like cascade of yeses, all down the hillside and into the river. 

It’s not beautiful because of the artwork, although I love Arp. It’s beautiful because of the way it sits in the hills, a sprawling, wide-windowed structure that for all its alien whiteness seems to belong there. It is embracing/embraced by the grass. I could sing praises of the upshooting elevator all the day long. And the tunnel! Of course it also has the wonderful Rhine flowing below it. 

The only bummer is all the walltexts relating to artwork and exhibitions are only in German, so it would frustrate most non-German speakers, and I wouldn't drive my parents out there. As I often do, I wonder if I should volunteer to translate it all for the good of humanity, but 1) I don’t have time and 2) Ach, the bureaucracy. Nevertheless, I think Arp would be happy to find this building spilling down the hills, and some texts from his "Wolkenpumpe" (Cloudpump) poems way up on the uppermost walls. 

Apocalypse Oil

Today’s misreading is brought to you by Braun, the maker of electric razors, coffee crushers and hand vacuums.

This morning as I was reaching for something in the bathroom cabinet, my eyes scanned a small plastic vial of liquid. Because I was not really looking at it, and because I did not really care, and because the mind will always rush to fill in the blanks, what I saw there was a bottle of Apocalypse Oil.

Right there in the bathroom cabinet. Apocalypse Oil! The apocalypse couldn’t go on without it. All brought to you by Braun, maker of appliances for small household chores such as ending the world.

Some Paintings from The Map and the Territory

The Journalist Jean-Pierre Pernaut Chairing an Editorial Meeting: The expressions of Pernaut’s staff, listening to the directives of their charismatic leader with a curious mixture of veneration and disgust, had not been easy to render.

Bill Gates and Steve Jobs Discussing the Future of Information Technology: The Conversation at Palo Alto: Jobs ... seemed paradoxically an embodiment of austerity, or the Sorge traditionally associated with Protestant capitalism. There was nothing Californian in the way his hand clutched his jaw as if to help him some difficult reflection. 

The Stock Exchange Flotation of Shares in Beate Uhse: Reminiscent of the expressionist period, we are very far from the scathing, caustic treatment of a George Grosz or an Otto Dix...His traders in running shoes and hooded sweatshirts, who acclaim with blasé world-weariness the great German porn businesswoman, are the direct descendants of the suited bourgeois who meet endlessly in the receptions directed by Fritz Lang. 

Ferdinand Desroches, Horse Butcher and Claude Vorilhon, Bar-Tabac Manager: if Martin began by looking at two washed-up professions, it was in no way because he wanted to encourage lamentations on their probable disappearance; it was simply that they were indeed going to disappear soon, and it was important to fix their images on canvas. 

Aimée, Escort Girl: A fulfilled young woman, both sensual and intelligent ... treated with an exceptionally warm palette based on umber, Indian orange, and Naples yellow. 

The Engineer Ferdinand Piech Visiting the Production Workshops at Molsheim: The wide V-shaped formation of the small group of engineers and mechanics following Piech on his visit to the workshops recalled very precisely ... the group of agronomists and middle-poor peasants accompanying President Mao Zedong in a watercolor reproduced in issue 122 of China in Construction, entitled Forward to Irrigated Rice Growing in the Province of Hunan! 

Damien Hirst and Jeff Koons Dividing Up the Art Market: The night itself wasn't right: it didn't have that sumptuousness, that mystery one associates with nights on the Arabian Peninsula; he should have used a deep blue, not ultramarine. He was making a truly shitty painting. He seized a palette knife, cut open Damien Hirst's eye, and forced the gash wider; it was a canvas of tight linen fibers, and therefore very tough. 

Michel Houellebecq, Writer: Martin probably chose to portray him in the middle of a universe of paper neither to make a statement about realism in literature nor to bring Houellebecq closer to a formalist position ... Without doubt, more simply, he was taken by a purely plastic fascination with the image of these branching blocks of text, engendering one another like some gigantic octopus.

Same old busyness

The war is scheduled for next week.
It will be a short war, possibly bloodless.
And on the weekend
there will be dancing.

summertime

The school summer vacation ends next week. In Germany, summer break time is kinder than in the US, clocking in at just six weeks, a manageable amount of leisure. The 12 weeks I had as kid in NJ wasn’t only enough for my parents, but also for me, pining away for my friends and frenemies at the end of August.

Just before school resumed I always went back-to-school shopping with my mother. What I wanted most was sweaters and a pair of corduroys, even though September was still too hot for them, even though you could still go sleeveless. 

I mentioned this annual event to my mother the other day, who revealed she’d disliked it. She put an advance cap on spending, a good move. I never do that with my kids - I just expect reason to kick in. But then again we don’t really go back-to-school shopping, summer being rather short, not long enough to grow out of your clothes.